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Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

theatlantic.com

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Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#21

Post by actionfromafar »

JohnMakin wrote: post #8

> The very idea of popularity is up for debate: Is that trend really viral? Did everyone see that post, or is it just my little corner of the internet? This is exactly it. Consider a scenario that's likely fairly common given experiments I've done in the last several years. Say a site people still use to talk to/keep in touch with friends sometimes like IG/FB decides a user is "toxic" and either shadowbans them, or s…

The trick is to auto-tune the algorithm just short of total depression, and give them a glimmer of hope and interaction with friends. Then it's back to the ads for a new cycle. What's great about AI is that the we don't even need anyone to code this explicitly, it will just happen automatically.

This way it's not malicious at all! /s

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#24

Post by maerF0x0 »

> Popular content is being consumed at an astounding scale, yet popularity and even celebrity feel miniaturized, siloed. We live in a world where it’s easier than ever to be blissfully unaware of things that other people are consuming.

I've long been trying to communicate this trend to anyone who will listen, once needs are saturated the trend becomes building specialization that produces the most hedonism/value for the individual (per unit of inputs). Taken to the limit the outcome is a product perfectly attuned to your feel good chemical receptors in your body and brain.

Given a download of your brain, the future looks like generated content that is attuned to you alone, and is suboptimal for everyone else (relative to their own generated content). There will be a minor amount of novelty added to stimulate those circuits (and check the gradient for optima), but will mostly be a remix of what you already respond to.

So instead of Nike choosing to produce 10, err 100, colors of shoes, they will simply make exactly the color you want, just for you (and whoever collides).

Part of this will be an explosion in creativity because as an individual you will be able to express what you want and create it without the years/decades of training required to learn Script writing, or film, or the guitar, or how to sew etc.

Will it be good for us or society? That's a moral argument I'm not making here. Just an observation and extrapolation of what seems to be happening.

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#25

Post by happytiger »

Perhaps the problem is that most of the “news” on the Internet is now behind a paywall. Audience fragmentation is the inevitable result of steady audience segmentation. What we are looking at is the inevitable result of incredible amounts of monetization effort, which inevitably empties the commons so that audiences can be properly extracted.

This very article about the phenomenon is unreadable by the majorly of Earth because it’s behind a paywall.

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#27

Post by jsbisviewtiful »

boredumb wrote: post #17

Reads like an out of touch journalist with a vendetta against elon musk before I got pay walled.

> with a vendetta against elon musk

I am assuming I was paywalled in the exact same spot as you and it's baffling from that small snippet that you came up with this claim. This is the exact quote and the only mention of that clown:

> the collapse of Twitter—now X—under Elon Musk,

Arguably, Twitter collapsed into... X?... and X's value has tanked in the last 12 months. That less than 10 word phrase is not the focus of the intro - It's the overall collapse of the centralized-on-social-media internet.

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#28

Post by Pxtl »

The paywall on the article is ironic since the collapse of free reputable news is likely another aspect of that.

I keep hoping the Fediverse will win. After what's happened to Twitter and Reddit and Facebook, it seems self-evident that our main means of public discourse needs to be something decentralized.

But the Fediverse is struggling. UX is a disaster, every instance admin is holding on by their fingernails to stay solvent and sane, product development is comparatively slow, and bad actors have only barely gotten started attacking them.

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#29

Post by 5350-uiop-1130 »

> "Consider TikTok....Try to imagine which posts might have been most popular on the site this year. Perhaps a dispatch from the Middle East....Or maybe something lighter, like a Gen Z dance trend....Well, no: According to TikTok’s year-end report, the most popular videos in the U.S.—clips...aren’t topical at all. They include makeup tutorials, food ASMR, a woman showing off a huge house cat, and a guy spray-painting his ceiling to look like Iron Man."

so the normies finally won.

i think it makes sense that virality now is totally controlled by algorithms. there's revenues to be made. such a thing can't be left to chance, that was a blip of early internet history.

to me its all become boring, too much content and all of it seems the same, bland and unoriginal. i know there's good stuff but it's not easy to find among the noise.

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#30

Post by panarky »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #9
mark242 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't want content aggregated by 3rd parties and drip-fed to me telling me what I should believe, what is important, and what I should focus on. > I want my AIs to give me a morning newspaper of content from across the internet (...) Please make this make sense.

I want to fine-tune AIs on my own decision-making in an auditable way where I can review their decisions and course correct their decision-making when they get it wrong. Where I don't need to read every letter I receive in the mail, and every text message delivered to my phone. I want to fine-tune AIs that can make approximately the same decisions I would about what is worth spending my time on, and what can safely b…

I'd be happy with a site like HN where thoughtful people gather to share what they know, to both provide and consume information and insight, to amplify our collective understanding and capability.

A site that is self-moderated by the community to suppress spam and trolls while surfacing quality material.

And a site where there are consequences when community members abuse their moderation privileges by downranking and flagging legitimate ideas, submitted in good faith, that is neither spam nor troll.

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